Assessing Creative Persons*

ABSTRACT Personality assessment, in contrast to psychodiagnosis, psychological testing, and the measurement of individual differences, attempts to delineate the person as a whole through the use of a multiplicity of procedures and emphasizes the more favorable and positive aspects of personality and its potentialities for effective functioning. Developed during World War II, the method has been most extensively used by the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, University of California. Berkeley, in its studies of highly creative persons. In these researches the characteristics of such persons have been effectively revealed, e.g., through the use of life history interviews, personality trait ratings, an adjective check list, and the Q-sort method, and their level of creativeness predicted by multiple regression analyses.     

Measuring Metasyntactic Abilities: On a Classification of Metasyntactic Tasks

Researchers working on metasyntactic abilities (i.e., the metalinguistic ability associated with syntax) face the problem of defining and measuring them. Metasyntactic abilities is a multifaceted concept, which encompasses various types of behaviours, from being able to intentionally manipulate syntactic structures to being able to state syntactic rules, and the way in which it is defined and measured varies greatly from one study to another. The present paper proposes a theoretically informed classification of syntax related tasks. The first part presents previous research defining and distinguishing various types of syntactic and metasyntactic abilities and their interrelations. In the second part, commonly used tasks are described and analyzed in terms of the framework presented, with the aim of better pinpointing the type of ability measured by each task. Ultimately, with this analysis of commonly used tasks, we hope to offer criteria for discriminating between the various measures of metasyntactic abilities.     

Leadership of Creative Teams*

Where there is a history of teamwork and cooperation, where multiple centers of resources exist, and where integrative sentiments prevail over territoriality, then the efforts of innovation are more likely to succeed … Innovation may be the only hope for the time ahead. (Kanter, 1984, p. 55)     

Tasks for Assessing Memory for Temporal Order Versus Memory for Items in Aging

Younger and older adults were compared on new tests for item and temporal memory suitable for use in future electrophysiological or neuroimaging studies. Following a series of 10 simple line drawings, 4-choice panels containing two previously seen targets and two novel distractors appeared. Participants identified which pictures had been seen previously (item), or which of the items was presented earliest (temporal order). Performance of younger adults was superior to that of older adults. Memory for item and temporal order were equivalent in the younger group. In contrast, the item memory of the older group was superior to memory for temporal order, confirming previous evidence of differential impairment of memory for temporal order with age.     

创造性任务情境下社会惰化影响因素研究

研究一,采用单因素组间设计(合作组、名义组、个人组)检验创造性任务情境下是否存在社会惰化效应,结果显示:合作组状态下个体努力水平显著低于名义组,与个人组差异不显著;研究二,采用三因素组间设计(4×2×3)探讨创造性任务情境下社会惰化影响因素,结果显示:目标难度、绩效评估变量主效应显著且存在交互作用,而中期评估变量主效应不显著。研究结果提示:高难度目标、评估个体对群体的贡献可减弱创造性任务情境下的社会惰化效应。